


All Exits Look the Same

by patchfire, raving_liberal



Series: Story of Three Boys [69]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-25
Updated: 2012-04-25
Packaged: 2017-11-04 07:30:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/391323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patchfire/pseuds/patchfire, https://archiveofourown.org/users/raving_liberal/pseuds/raving_liberal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>July 28-29, 2012; They have to get up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Exits Look the Same

Puck crosses the state line into Ohio a lot earlier than he thought he would. Forty miles to Lima, and the clock in the Nav reads 4:15 am. Kurt’s still sleeping, curled up with his head against the window, and Puck realizes that having him do most of the driving was an even better decision than they first thought. No, driving for the last three hours and change on three hours of sleep wasn’t great fun, but Kurt’s going to end up with at least four hours of sleep before he has to open the shop, and Puck can crash at Rina and Hannah’s apartment before he walks to work around one. 

When they roll into Lima right around five, Puck steers the Nav straight for the Waffle House, and after thinking about it for a few minutes, sets the alarm on his phone, locks the doors, and lets himself drift off too. 

The alarm blares at 6:30 am, and they both jump awake. 

“Wha?” Kurt mumbles. 

“Lima,” Puck groans. “Got in around 5, decided to doze a bit here.”

“It’s.” Kurt looks at his own phone. “Six-thirty. I got five and a half hours?”

“Figured that with enough coffee, then, you’d be good to go for oil changes at least.”

Kurt nods. “Yes. Thank you.” He squeezes Puck’s leg and then looks out the window. “And a decent breakfast.”

“Last chance, or almost,” Puck says with a tiny grin. In a week, they’re going to be in New York, in the tiny apartment that’s their home for at least the next year, and probably for four or six, if they’re lucky and they like both the apartment and the location well enough. 

Marla’s not working, because it’s Saturday morning, and they don’t really converse with their server or the grill cook, even though there’s not many people in the restaurant that early. As they finish up, it gets a little more crowded, summer travelers headed away from Michigan starting to filter in. One of the families talks about heading towards the beach, and before Puck can stop himself, he asks which one. 

“Pensacola Beach!” is the enthusiastic answer, and Puck and Kurt exchange grins. 

“We just got back from there on Monday,” Kurt says. “It’s gorgeous.”

“Oh, any good places to eat that you’d recommend?” one of them asks, and Kurt and Puck talk about the beach a little bit, but once they stand up to pay, their smiles fall. 

“Were we really there a week ago?” Kurt murmurs.

“We didn’t check out until a week ago tomorrow,” Puck answers, shaking his head. It feels like a lifetime ago, the sun and the salt and the unrelenting heat. There was still a hint of a burn on Finn’s face when they left Madison, and—no. That’s a line of thought Puck’s not ready to follow, and when he bites his lip and meets Kurt’s eyes, he knows Kurt feels the same way. They’re at Waffle House in Lima, but they haven’t always been at Waffle House with Finn. They’re going to work later. Finn isn’t always at the shop when Kurt is. He doesn’t always come in while Puck’s working. 

They can do this. 

They have to do this. 

Puck leaves Kurt and the Nav at the shop, walking the few blocks back to the apartment and nursing his to-go coffee. By the time he gets inside the apartment, his mom and Hannah are both awake, so he doesn’t have to worry about waking them up. 

“Noah?” Rina calls, sounding surprised. 

“Yeah, Mom, it’s me,” he replies, taking off his shoes and dropping his duffel bag on the floor before sprawling on the couch. 

“I thought you two were helping Finn move in, up in Wisconsin.”

“We were. We did. We drove back last night,” Puck says with a yawn. “Kurt had to work today because Burt’s at orientation with Finn. I work at one, ‘cause I swapped with...” He frowns. “Somebody. To get Thursday off. I think today is for Thursday, anyway.” He shrugs. “Can I sleep here while you’re at services?”

“Of course,” Rina says, nodding. “Do you want the air mattress?”

Puck shakes his head. “Nah. Takes too long.”

“All right.” Rina sounds amused. “We’ll be gone before too long.”

Puck doesn’t really notice the noise, though, falling asleep quickly, and it’s a few hours later when he wakes up, grabs some lunch, and uses Hannah’s shower before changing into his clothes for work and heading out for Starbucks. 

Work drags after a few hours, but there’s coffee, and once Kurt closes the shop, he drives over to Starbucks, sitting at a table close to the counter. They manage to keep a running conversation that ignores the topic of Finn for a couple of hours, and it’s weird and painful but mentioning him sounds far more painful so they go with it. 

Puck closes up the store and walks out to the Nav slowly, arm around Kurt. The house is quiet and dark; Burt and Carole locked everything up before heading out for Madison themselves. Still, Puck feels like he _should_ be calling out a hello, and Kurt looks like he feels the same way. 

“Want something to eat?” Kurt asks quietly, and Puck nods, so they head into the kitchen, grabbing some leftover fruit and popping some popcorn after that. It isn’t until they start to go upstairs that it hits Puck fully. 

They have to go past Finn’s empty room. There’s no ignoring it. They can try to pretend he’s out somewhere else, but when they left Thursday morning, his room was a skeleton of itself: empty drawers, blank walls, missing lamps. There’s no way to ignore it. 

Maybe they’re masochistic, Puck thinks, because once they get to the top of the stairs, they walk wordlessly to Finn’s room, and Kurt flips on the light. 

It hits them both at the same time, Puck knows, he can tell by the way Kurt flinches and the way Puck feels like someone punched his gut. Yeah, they remembered Finn was selling his furniture, just like Kurt is going to sell his, just like Puck sold his months ago, and even though they saw Burt hand the cash to Finn the day before, somehow they’d managed to forget that between Thursday at 5 am and Friday at 8 am, the furniture had actually sold.

Finn’s room is empty. 

There’s no desk, no dresser, no bedside table, no mattress. The curtains are gone. The closet is slightly ajar, but there are no clothes hanging inside. It’s like Finn is gone, like he never existed, and Puck doesn’t realize he’s crying until it hits him that he and Kurt are sitting in the doorway, and Kurt’s shaking, and Puck’s own face is wet. 

He’s been erased, gone to Wisconsin and his football-playing life, and they’re leaving in less than seven days for New York and their admittedly very gay life, and everything from the last two months, everything from the time that Burt and Carole got married—it’s like it never happened, like there was never a person named Finn that lived in this room, like there was never a person that they loved. 

The only threads tying them together, Puck realizes, are the threads they choose; their college experiences are all going to be music-related, yes, but different enough that they likely won’t even have similar classes to compare. 

Puck’s arms are around Kurt, and Kurt’s are around Puck, and they’re both crying hard, and Puck would like to say that they are in Finn’s room because they can still barely smell him in it. He’d like to think that there’s a little bit of Finn left in there, left for them to hold onto, but he can see the lines that the vacuum cleaner made in the carpet, overlaying the indentations from Finn’s furniture, and Puck knows it’s a lie, a lie he’s telling himself and a lie that Kurt’s probably telling himself as well, and that realization breaks the last bit of self-restraint.

 

For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Kurt wakes up disoriented. There’s the familiar feel of Noah pressed against him, though, and it takes at least twenty seconds before Kurt can put all of the pieces together. He’s pressed between the doorway and Noah, sitting mostly in Finn’s completely empty room. They all knew this was coming; Finn’s room into a nursery and Kurt’s room into a guest room, all the furniture sold. Somehow, in the back of his mind, though, Kurt hadn’t thought they’d have to see the in-between. 

He somehow expected to leave in August with Finn’s room and Kurt’s room, and return in December to the nursery and the guest room, with none of the mess of changing between those two realities. Instead, they’re smack in the middle of it, the room already feeling somehow sterile, and when Kurt looks beside him, he can see the tear tracks down Noah’s face. He knows his own face looks the same. 

Kurt pulls Noah’s phone out and checks the time; 3:30 am. He checks to make sure the alarm is turned on, and satisfied that is, Kurt slides them from their sitting position so that they’re more or less lying down. It’s not the best sleep they’ve ever had, but if they get even an hour more of pretending, Kurt will take it. 

 

The alarm is loud. The alarm is loud, the carpet is scratchy on his cheek, and Kurt is warm. Noah frowns, his thoughts starting to catch up with him. Why is there carpet on his cheek? 

It comes back to him in a rush, hitting him like a punch in the gut, again, and he winces as he opens his eyes. Kurt looks back at him, looking equally devastated, and it occurs to Noah that they aren’t exactly fit to go out in public, not looking like they do at present. Noah has to work, though, has to open Starbucks and sell coffee and pastries for eight hours. 

“Hi,” Kurt whispers, like his voice can’t get any louder, and when Noah responds, he realizes it’s true, he can’t seem to muster up the energy to speak loudly. 

“Morning, blue eyes,” Noah breathes. 

“I’m coming to work with you,” Kurt continues in his soft, sad voice. “I’ll just sit at a table and find good prices on used textbooks, maybe.”

Noah nods, understanding what Kurt can’t quite say—that he can’t stay alone in the house, not now, not yet, and, Noah thinks, maybe not at all. “Sounds like a good plan. You could keep making lists for IKEA, too.”

“Yes, that’s good,” Kurt agrees. He exhales shakily. “We have to get up, Noah.”

“I know,” Noah says, pressing his lips together. 

“He... he didn’t.” Kurt stops. “There wasn’t anyone else there, Noah.”

“No.” Noah can feel Kurt trembling, can feel himself trembling, lying there on the empty floor of what was once Finn’s bedroom. “There wasn’t.”

“We knew, but. Fuck.”

“Fuck,” Noah agrees. “Just, _fuck_ , K.”

“I guess...” Kurt trails off. “I don’t know. I don’t even fucking know.”

“I have to go to work, and sell coffee, and pretend like I don’t expect him to walk in. And tomorrow, you have to go to work and do the same fucking thing, and it _sucks_ and there’s not a fucking thing we can do about it.” Noah shakes his head. “We should have—we’d take whatever.”

“Yes. Whatever terms,” Kurt echoes. “But. He’s in Wisconsin and we’re going to be in New York, and.”

“And we have to get up.”

“And we have to get up,” Kurt repeats, nodding. “What do we do?”

“We swim, swim.”


End file.
